Conservation of Experience
If the universe were just, Loretta Gupta, Ph.D. would be forever remembered as the discoverer of Qualium, the researcher who shattered the hard problem of consciousness. Sadly, the universe is not just.
Dr. Gupta's discovery began with the observation that after interacting with Large Language Models (LLMs), her postdoctoral research assistants were listless and bored; hardly their usual energetic young selves. Not to mention useless for doing theoretical physics research. Most likely she was noticing a spurious correlation, but Gupta was intrigued and set up an informal experiment to disprove the link.
Experimental Group A directly interacted with LLM software and had the strongest effect. Control groups C (interacting with non-LLM software), D (non-LLM software in use, non-interactive) and E (no software) were unaffected. Most startling was the outcome for Experimental Group B, who were in a room with a computer executing LLM software, but with no inputs and outputs. For members of Group B, the degree of flattened affect was indistinguishable from group A.
Amused, she published her findings on arXiv under a pseudonym and moved on. That is, until it was cited by Emi Suzuiki in a paper that found that the performance of a synthetic nematode connectome was measurably degraded when it occupied the same shared hosting server as LLM software.
Gupta and the Suzuki collaborated on their next paper, establishing a causal relationship between LLM software usage and impaired neural activity, both in natural and simulated neurons. After use of LLM software was discontinued the neural activity initially appeared to return to baseline after a period of time. The problem was that Suzuki measured a higher baseline than Gupta, even for the identical synthetic connectome on identical hardware.
Gupta's lab, as it turns out, was in a building shared with the business school. The MBAs had long since incorporated use of LLMs into every aspect of their work: writing business plans, evaluating business plans, drafting e-mails, summarizing e-mails, generating dataing profiles, sifting through dating profiles for good matches. You name it, they were doing it with LLMs.
The evidence gathered by Gupta and Suzuki soon became crystal clear: neural activity and deep learning software both use, and potentially exhaust, some physical feature of spacetime not previously identified. Their next paper coined the term "Qualium", detailed construction of a 7-neuron device to measure the ambient level, and clearly showed that the Earth's baseline level of Qualium had been depleted by 2% since Suzuki's paper.
The fact is, we now face two ecological catastrophes: anthropogenic climate change ,and now Qualium exhaustion. World leaders have spent the last few decades saying much and doing little about the former. What, if anything, will they do about the impending Qualium shortage? In both cases, taking real action seems to risk the "line go up" nature of the global economic system. Well, I for one hope that we run out of Qualium before we cook in an atmosphere of CO2. By all acccounts the ego-death of Qualium deprivation is a painless one. I just regret that my animated corpse will probably continue serving the ends of capitalism until it, too, dies. I'm just glad I won't be there to experience it.
Welcome to the Polity
(CW: Dysphoria, suicide)
Good news, Citizen!
Your connectome is among those archived from your ancestral homeworld, Earth. Galactic Polity \ufffd has chosen to instantiate it, and grants you full citizenship, with all the attendant rights and obligations.
Future directions for SCORPION STARE: 2022 Grant Recipients
Distribution: General / non-confidential
It pleases Us to announce that the following experimental research programmes will each receive £10,000,000 guaranteed and inflation adjusted anually for three years:
Two-diode imaging (Dean, Salem, Chen)
Single-pixel cameras have been an area of research for two decades, and it has been understood for even longer how to use a reverse-biased LED to measure ambient light levels. Combining the two technologies with SCORPION STARE could potentially allow 'STARE devices to be miniaturized into millimeter-scale passive devices.Deep Stare (Wu, Angelov, Soleymani)
Technology like Deep Convolutional Networks, AGAINs, and the like have made it possible to create plausible images from archetypes. Deep Stare, if its promise can be realized, will allow remote / non-line-of-sight deployment of STARE technology against enemies of the state. All that is required is an accurate image generating model, coupled with petascale iteration, to neutralize a threat based on a description. Imagine that you can simply input "a 25-year old caucasian male insurgent stands in front of a High street shop, waiting for the right moment to unleash the demonic threads even now coiling in his belly", and before he can act, he is turned into radioactive slag.Stereo acoustic imaging (Toth, Ben-Amram, Toth)
It will happen to one woman out of four in her lifetime: that hoped-for pregnancy converted to tragedy when her gynecologist explains that the embryo is (the wrong kind of) nonhuman. Stereo acoustic imaging promises to allow easy, outpatient treatment for our most precious resource, fertile females.Civilian Applications
We also wish to announce funding of the following programmes to create civilian applications for SCORPION STARE technology. Each programme will receive £100,000 in the first year, with possible increase to £500,000 per year based on progress. In exchange, the Crown is awarded 27% of eventual revenues, in purpetuity.- Chain-free "chainsaw"
- Single-use heating pads
- Assisted suicide VR Goggles
- Insect Control Cameras
- Artificial Tanning Beds
His Majesty would like to congratulate all surviving entrants for their inventive grant proposals.
The Drake-Howard Equation
The Drake-Howard equation is:
N = R* × f# × ne × fq × dl × fc × Lwhere N = the number of elder gods in the multiverse which might wish to consume our souls and
- R* = The number of regular languages
- f# = The fraction of regular languages that match at least one string
- ne = The fraction of self-Gödelizing strings per regular language that matches at least one string
- fq = The fraction of self-Gödelizing strings that are also functional quines
- dl = The sum to infinity of the average measure of quine islands divided by Levenshtein distance
- fc = The fraction of of all functional quines which can be realized by Standard Model matter
- L = The time between Second Order Grand Conjunctions
As R* is infinite (actually, א1) and all other values are nonzero, it follows that the number of soul-devouring elder gods is infinite. The Drake-Howard Equation is also sometimes called Rule 110.
Re: Ideas box submissions
Codewords: Clear
Distribution: Primary and residual human resources
To whom it may concern:
Please stop stuffing the ideas box with proposed solutions to anthropogenic climate change. As you know, the worst case consequences of ACC are predicted to be:
- Hundreds of thousands of premature deaths per year
- Millions of QUALYs lost per year
- Hundreds of millions of environmental migrants
- Regional and possible large-scale war over access to resources, including potable water
- Trillions of Euros of property damage and loss
- Loss of low-lying areas to sea-level change
The ideas box is for discussion of SERIOUS threats to humanity, such as
- Netflix cancellation of all its superhero shows
- Possible interference by Blue Hades in the Oscars awards
- Failed firmware updates on conspicuous-consumption "fitness" devices
- Those demonic wasp-things that are gestating in the abdomens of several world leaders
- Irritating advertisements interrupting our free music streaming
Thank you for your attention in this matter.
— The Management
Codeword TESTAMENT COBALT
Files sealed under codeword TESTAMENT COBALT reveal an unusual cooperative mission between the Laundry and civilian law enforcement, beginning as early as 2009.
To quote the former Senior Auditor, it's "fractal contingency plans all the way down". TESTAMENT COBALT was another such contingency plan, one of many directed at establishing permanent human presence on parallel planets Earth. As a secondary goal, it would create a cadre of grateful youth and young adults who were bound to the Laundry by minor Geases without being on-the-books Laundry staff.
In the late 1990s, when relations between the OPA and the Laundry were on relatively good footing, the Laundry received a list of what we now know were second-tier sites from ABJAD SURVEY: Generally, parallel earths which were capable of supporting unprotected plant and animal life, but due to variations in fundamental constants could not support silicon-based computer techonlogy. Even then, the OPA was so dependent on digital technology that they deemed such worlds useless for their own needs.
The next lucky break (pun intended) occurred during the human exploration phase of the EDEN (Escaping DEmons Nextdoor) project when an unlucky team member suffered a compound fracture due to a fall. The team medic quickly discovered that the particular fundamental constants in this universe left all opioid painkillers totally ineffective. Subsequent to the team's emergency return, debriefing revealed that a third team member who had successfully concealed her prescription painkiller addiction up to that point had felt her addictive cravings disappear upon arrival on the the parallel now designated TESTAMENT COBALT 2007a. After a specific testing protocol was instituted, further TESTAMENT COBALT parallels were identified (TC2007b-f, TC2008g-w and TC2009x-ai)
From these pieces, an enterprising member of the Laundry formed their plan for an unusual diversion/drug addiction reabilitation program. In conjunction with a few friendly law enforcement officers in Avon and Somerset, the program got off the ground in small numbers at first, but at its peak there were apparently hundreds of participants per site on at least 8 TESTAMENT COBALT sites.
For participants, the benefits were clear: no criminal record, and a complete recovery from chemical addiction after just a few weeks in a rural area without social media or internet. In return, participants agreed to not disclose the details of the TESTAMENT COBALT sites and enrolled in what was termed a voluntary national service program—until age 35, they could be called up in time of emergency to serve the country. Both clauses were enforced by minor geas upon acceptance of the contract.
This clause was activated by Senior Auditor Dr. Armstrong in 2014 during the events of The Delirium Brief. Within moments, some 28,000 program participants disappeared from this Earth, returned to their TESTAMENT COBALT parallel worlds. Then, using the thaumic energy of approximately 33% of those worlds' native plant, animal, and sea life, a hyperspatial isolation ("hyperstop") grid with a duration of up to a gigasecond was kicked off, sealing them away from the rest of the multiverse. It's up to them to survive and thrive while restricted to an agrarian level of technology.
We can only hope that when the first of these grids collapses in 2050, TESTAMENT COBALT subjects and their descendants will rejoin a local multiverse that is once again habitable by the sort of life that once lived here on Earth.
"We fight on so that something that remembers being human might survive" — S.A. Armstrong
Codeword BISON ZENITH
This is a work of fiction, channeling Charlie Stross and his Laundry Files series. I made it after we started hearing rumors that Intel has cancelled their next generation process too... BISON ZENITH confirmed
Connect the dots:
Internal Intel memos from as early as 2008 confirm a skunkworks plan to develop metamaterials—a "superlens"—rather than pursue techniques like EUV for post-14nm process nodes. The "superlens" was supposed to be able to focus normal UV light onto sub-wavelength regions, impossible for traditional optics and even according to the predictions of quantum physics.
FOIA requests show hundreds of chartered flights yearly from the NSA's Utah Data Center to the Chandler Municipal Airport, just 3 miles from Intel's Fab 42 just outside Phoenix Arizona, starting in 2012 and continuing until April 2018.
The uncanny resemblance of Chandler's Cottonwood and Sun Lakes golf course developments to class D and F warding glyphs; and the unusually strict anti-occult and anti-religious symbol rules in the HOA covenants. (This would have been for the safety of the subdivision's occupants; at such short range even as innocuous a religious symbol as a "marshmallow peep" would burst into flame within the area of the glyph itself)
Results from ABJAD SURVEY show that in near-habitable parallels, the most frequent parameter variation that prohibits the survival of an earth biosphere is in the parameter 'c', the speed of light. Variations as small as 3% prevent pollinators from locating flowers, but even variations of 27% are short-term survivable by adult humans, given proper personal protection.
The unexplained hour of localized daytime darkness in Chandler AZ on 4/18/18; initially reported as a "terror attack", there were no direct casualties (just road accidents). The official NTSB report states that the crashed Cessna 680 on arrival from Salt Lake City had no one on board.
Our conjecture:
When the Black Chamber shows up with credentials that say "NSA" and promises you access to an out of this world process for creating integrated circuits, you need to take that phrase literally. But of course in the first two decades of the century, there was no awareness of this in the general public. And if you were on the inside, you would authorize such activities as a matter of course.
The "superlens" technology is better understood as a pair of back to back gates, leading to a region of the multiverse with the a 'c' value about 70% below nominal. This would allow a UV process that supported the 17nm node in our physics to scale down to the 5nm mode, allowing Intel to maintain its worldwide process advantage for a decade or more.
Black Chamber produced the superlenses at the Utah Data Center and hand delivered them to Intel staff who were unaware of just what they were handling. The gates were presumably designed with a half life of around a week, based on the frequency of flights. This plan went fine, until something happened on the 4/18 flight. Did containment of the gates fail during the flight, or was it a part of a defection plan or a convert operation by one of our adversaries?
In any case, Intel never did ship a post-14nm part from the Chandler fabrication facility.
Editor's note: Strictly speaking, 'c' is not a parameter, since it is not one of the fundamental dimensionless constants. Technically, I should say 'ɑ'. But since the effect we're interested in pertains to the speed of light, it is clearer to express things in these terms. Remember, in atomic units 'ɑ = 1/c'.
Stross releases Singularity E-book
Charles Stross has released a downloadable, creative-commons version of Accelerando, "a fictional depiction of a possible Technological Singularity lying in our near future". I'm still in the first part, which I had also read in a copy of Asimov's Sci-Fi. It's good stuff. I'm glad I'll be able to read it from start to end, not in a random order whenever I travel and check out whatever copies of the magazine happen to be at the library the day I leave town.
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